Summary European and United States-based carriers have seen limited growth opportunities for flights in China. That was because in large part, these airlines have been affected by the closure of the airspace over Russia, which has not affected their Chinese counterparts. As a result, China-based airlines have outpaced European and US-based companies when it comes to the recovery of flights from/to China.
Over the past few years, ever-escalating tensions and geopolitical rifts between Europe and the United States and Russia, as well as its close ally, China, have also affected aviation in various ways. Without mentioning aircraft-related issues, including Western lessors’ assets that are stuck in Russia , one problem that has been affecting carriers on the Western side of the geopolitical block was that they could no longer access Russia’s airspace following the country’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, Western allies have banned Russian airlines from entering their airspace, with the latter immediately repaying the favor.
As a result, European and US airlines have largely avoided adding flights to China and Hong Kong, while airlines based in these regions have outpaced the growth of their Western counterparts, adding more frequencies year-on-year (YoY) in 2024. Uneven growth Looking at data from the aviation analytics company Cirium , 15 Europe and US-based airlines, excluding Russian carriers, have scheduled 234 weekly flights to China and Hong Kong i.